Tea at Trianon: Dress in the Age of Jane Austen

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Dress in the Age of Jane Austen

From Perspectives on History:

When fashion historian Hilary Davidson (Univ. of Sydney) was living in, as she put it, “Jane Austen’s heartland of Hampshire” in England, the senior keeper of decorative arts at the Hampshire County Museum Services and Archives asked her to make a replica of the novelist’s pelisse—a long women’s coat-dress that the novelist likely wore—which the museum owned. As both a curator and a sewer, Davidson was an ideal candidate to create a replica that could be loaned out without risking damage to the original. Through the project and the talks she gave on the pelisse, Davidson noticed that the public often learned what they knew about dress in Britain’s Regency era (1811–20) through such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and the costume dramas based on them. (Read more.)